x_Theorist:

Thank you Horus, I agree with you. The aid is an impediment to our ambition for self realization and blocks our resourcefullness for competition.

What utter bullshit.
If the West cut aid to Africa, millions would die.
The problem is not with aid. The problem is how it's used and the attitude towards it. That is something that only Africa can deal with.

Someone said Africa needs trade not aid. But if you've got nothing to trade and no money to buy with, statements like that are purely a pipedream. Sure, industries could be set up by Africans but look at how successful they've been in the past. Within a couple of years, they've been destroyed by corruption or fallen prey in civil strife.

It's not a case of the West giving with one hand and taking with the other, it's the African mind-set of holding it's hand out all the time and just wasting good money.

That problem isn't caused by the West. They don't cause the poverty that kick-starts the process. It's tribalism that's the cause.
Look anywhere in Africa and you will see tribalism causing corruption, violence and leading onto poverty and circulating back round again. That cannot be blamed on the West - it's an African problem that has been around long before colonisation.

Shit, the West was even dumb enough to export it to it's own shores during slavery. Look at the US cities now with the black gangs. Nothing more than another form of tribalism that keeps the black people down. But who's fault is it? Whites didn't start the gangs. Sure, US negroes would say it's caused by poverty but they're simply doing nothing more than reverting to their African roots.

Deal with tribalism and then you can start solving the problems. Until then, Africa will always rely on handouts. Stop the aid and you just go into a vicious circle of more poverty, more corruption, more violence and more tribalism.

The only way out for Africa is for the African to stop shitting on his brother. Once he realises that, he can start to build.

Horus:

So long as we remain mentally dependent on other races to do our thinking and plan our progress, that is how long we will remain in the ghettoes and slums and the poverty and diseases that they produce, and mental dependence presupposes physical dependence. If we need something we must work in unity and get it or create it ourselves

Gbam!
It's not as if 'we' are dependent on other countries to do our thinking for us, it's that our inexpressibly incompetent leadership is. Notice how almost everything in Africa, from its politics to its trade,is a crude copy of Western political  practices?Crude,semi-illiterate politicians formulating the only kind of policy they know; crude,illiterate policies. Look at the Bakassi fiasco. Look how Yar Dua played to the international gallery,kissing ass,instead of doing what's best for his country? Africa's only sickness is poor education and the poor quality of its leadership. Singapore has zero natural resources. But a 100% literacy rate and excellent leadership for comparably few years turned that country into a remarkable testimony of what can happen to any country when its leadership is visionary, focused and,er, educated.

AID to Africa must stop, be pahsed out. Even those administering the grants have 'fessed that it's a failure. We've grown comfortable being the world's charity case. There are hundreds of Foundations dedicated to humanitarian causes in Africa, and embarrassingly few of them were started by Africans. When children were being labelled witches in Akwa Ibom, all Nigeria did was talk,as usual. It took a 29-year-old English boy to actually do something about it. We have taken Foreign AID for granted and it's holding the continent back. Decades of having other people handle our problems has made us hopelessly complacent and incapable of original thought and solution-finding. Lasting solutions to Africa's problems must come from Africa itself.

wbb

Bastage, what country do you reside in?

Bastage,
You must be an alien living in Mars, carefully re read all posts on the subject matter to get what this is all about.

Critique of Dambisa Moyo's dead aid.

The Dambisa Moyo phenomenon shows no signs of abating, with a front page story in the FT and an elevation this month to Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people. The publicity is also selling a lot of books - she’s currently 3rd in Amazon US sales rankings for books on ‘policy and current events’ (no sour grapes there, honest….).

So with heavy heart, it’s time to add my tuppence. Every time I say anything unkind about her book, Dead Aid, I get a volley of abuse about being a white imperialist male unwilling to surrender the intoxicating power conferred by being a paid up member of the ‘aid industry’ (n.b. I’m being sarcastic, OK?). So just in case you’re naïve enough to think the continent speaks with one (Moyoesque) voice, here is a review by Chikondi Mpokosa, from Malawi, about her disappointment with the book. Chikondi is Oxfam’s Global Education Adviser, so cynics might argue that she is not neutral but a) Moyo’s main objection is to official government to government aid, not the NGO type, b) Chikondi sees lots of problems with traditional aid and c) Moyo previously worked for Goldman Sachs and the World Bank, which also seems to have shaped her views somewhat (see below). For a more academic review by a fellow Zambian economist, see here, and Sudanese-born telecoms magnate and philanthropist Mo Ibrahim has also weighed in in the Financial Times - an entire FT online debate on ‘Is Aid Working’ can be found here.

As for the book, Moyo’s critique of ‘old aid’ rings the occasional bell with me (e.g. its potential to undermine domestic politics and the state-citizen social contract), but overall, it has been taken to task by Kevin Watkins and Owen Barder among others for highly selective use of the evidence (even by NGO standards…) and dodgy attribution of causality (she argues that since poor countries receive lots of aid, aid must be to blame for their plight, but as Kevin points out, ‘using her logic, you could argue that fire engines cause fires because you find them near burning houses’ - see cartoon.) The BBC Hardtalk programme also had a good televised head to head with Alison Evans, the new director of the Overseas Development Institute.

But it is Dead Aid’s purported alternatives to aid that seem particularly feeble: African governments should issue lots of bonds (not too many takers at the moment - bad luck on the timing there); trust in China (and thus get stuck in commodity dependence, let alone the human rights issues); rich countries should remove barriers to trade (fine, but it won’t make much difference except in a few particular products like cotton) and invest in infrastructure (does anyone disagree with that?) and access to microfinance needs to be increased (sure, but it’s not even close to a magic bullet).

What is most noticeable is what’s missing – the book claims to be about finding better ways to finance development, but she barely mentions taxation or redistribution. Maybe it’s that Goldman Sachs/Zambian elite thing coming through again.

Overall, I was intrigued by Moyo’s politics/ideology. She manages to combine an entirely understandable resentment to the patronizing ways of aid donors and their crass portrayal of her continent (in Tony Blair’s awful soundbite) as ‘a scar on the conscience of the world’, an uncritical celebration of the rise of Chinese and Indian influence in Africa, and a highly conventional international financier’s assumption that free capital markets will solve every problem. A kind of third worldist neoliberalism, or right wing version of the old ‘aid as imperialism’ line.

But if the book itself is so flawed, that makes its phenomenal success all the more intriguing. It’s clearly hit some kind of chord with leaders like Rwanda’s Paul Kagame and other Africans who are sick of being lectured to by western aid donors and rock stars; aid sceptics like Bill Easterly can’t believe their luck (see increasingly acrimonious spat between him and Jeff Sachs), and of course any decent journalist relishes a good ‘man bites dog‘ story. But the danger is that it will provide useful cover to cash-strapped rich country governments seeking to backtrack on their aid promises, who can now say ’see, Africans say that aid doesn’t work, so let’s cut the budget’. As for those who disagree with her analysis, (and who in my opinion have rather more evidence on their side) it’s almost impossible to avoid sounding either defensive or self interested (this post is probably no exception). What to do to get the debate onto more sensible ground - the very pressing issue of what kinds of aid work, and what don’t, and how to reform it? The danger is, Moyo’s work will actually squeeze out that discussion. Any suggestions? (I may regret this…)



http://www.oxfamblogs.org/fp2p/?p=273

I know this thread has been on here for a while, but I feel I need to post my view anyway. Yes, I do agree that the US needs to stop AIDS to Africa. Not saying it is responsible for Africa's problems at all. I believe it is time Africa be allowed to deal with it's problems on it's own. If we cannot, then the natural process should be allowed to take over.

Kobojunkie:

I know this thread has been on here for a while, but I feel I need to post my view anyway. Yes, I do agree that the US needs to stop AIDS to Africa. Not saying it is responsible for Africa's problems at all. I believe it is time Africa be allowed to deal with it's problems on it's own. If we cannot, then the natural process should be allowed to take over.

Well said Kobo, Well said
What we need is transparent trade and not dubious aid.We will be better as a continent if these foreign powers stop meddling in our affairs to their advantage/our detriment.